Who could blame them?
The problem with cask ale isn't that young people don't drink it. It's that we haven't given them a reason to.
As I sat daydreaming out from the top deck of a number 12 bus the other day, my attention was caught by a kid walking along the pavement. I say kid. He must have been in his mid-20s. People that age are kids to me these days, which says more about me than it does about them.
He wore crocs with socks and thin, voluminous basketball shorts — this was in December, mind you. His only concession to winter was the thin rain jacket he wore. His hair was slicked back and he was talking into his phone which he held in front of his face rather than up to his ear.
I wanted so much in that moment to hate him. To deride his fashion choices. To mock his way of using the phone. To pooh-pooh his youthful swagger. I wanted to pronounce him wrong about everything — because that would have meant that I, in turn, was entirely right. And what a comfortable place that would have been.
Except of course it was bullshit. The kid wasn't wrong, he just liked different things to me. His tastes had nothing to do with me just as mine had nothing to do with him. The only real difference between us, when it came down to it, was that his preferences represented the coming world and mine did not.
It made me think of cask ale — that glorious, valuable, unique drink to which we in its homeland fail to pay proper heed. It is subtle, delicious, delicate, and increasingly ignored. I am in my 50s now and count myself among its confirmed lifelong fans. Even I think of it partly as an old man's drink. The kid would think it most assuredly so. If he stopped to think about it at all.
Cask ale's slow drift away from relevance saddens me. I fear we seem set to lose it altogether, and shall be culturally diminished as a result.
And the worst thing about it is this: the younger drinkers who choose not to drink cask ale are doing nothing wrong. It simply isn't relevant to them. Nor is this their failing; it is the beer's and the brewers' and the pub landlords'. And perhaps partly also mine, as a drinks writer, for failing to make its case often enough, loudly enough, or persuasively enough.
In the 1970s and 80s the men — and it was mostly men — who formed CAMRA faced a similar situation. They managed to turn things around for a while. But these days CAMRA and its members seem as ancient and ossified as the beer they tried to save. Perhaps all they did was delay the inevitable.
Beer styles have always gone in and out of favour. Cask ale isn't a beer style — it's a way of serving beer. But drinkers increasingly see it as synonymous with 'boring brown bitter', a single monolithic thing they've already decided isn't for them. Those of us who love it know there's far more to it than that, but we've failed to make that case. And when enough people see something as one thing, perhaps that's what it becomes, regardless of the truth.
Perhaps cask ale really will slip away within my lifetime, unloved and unmourned by the ever-increasing number of people walking around who seem to get younger every day. A few old farts like me may moan, but everyone else will just order what they want. Who could blame them?
